A lot of pain
by 26rainy
Summary: Set after Skye's accident which comes with a few changes onboard.
1. Chapter 1

**Part 1 – Never sure why I need you**

Jemma wasn't too fond of the sneaking around but she knew that it was necessary. They had talked about it, about telling the others, but they'd agreed that the best thing probably was to shut up about it. The best thing _technically _was probably to end it completely but she wasn't ready to do that. It was something about Fitz that was special. As if she needed his touch to get through the day, as if he was the oxygen that her lungs needed to oxygenate her blood and her heart. The thought of it scared her a great deal, especially since she was uncertain about how he felt. For all she knew, this could be nothing but sex for him. She shook her head as if to get rid of the thoughts. This was not was she was supposed to concentrate on; she had Skye's blood to analyze before the others got back from the Shield compound.

"What are you thinking about?" Fitz asked her.

He looked at her over the laptop screen. She realized that she'd been spinning around on her chair. Not the best thing to do, perhaps.

"Nothing special" she hurried to say. "I just can't find anything in Skye's blood. It's driving me bloody insane."

That was true. She wanted to find the drug that had saved Skye but after taking more than 10 blood samples from both Skye and Coulson, she was still unable to find anything unusual that they had in common.

"Maybe if you compare the blood to someone else's blood? Someone who hasn't been injected with the drug?" Fitz suggested. "Like me?"

"Hmm" Jemma said while taking the proposition into consideration. "That's actually not a bad idea. Can I take some of yours?"

Fitz swallowed. She knew that he wasn't very fond of needles but he'd offered. She though that taking her own could be a good idea as well, so she could compare Fitz's with Coulson's and her own with Skye's. She jumped off her chair and took down a box from a shelf. She took the smallest needle she could find and a pair of gloves.

"Pull up your sleeve please" she said while preparing the needle.

Fitz rolled over to her on his chair and did as he was told. He had a visible vein and she pierced it with the needle and tapped the cannula full with blood. She did it so quickly that it was all over by the time that Fitz had gotten over the pinch in his arm. She rolled of the gloves of her hands and threw them into the trashcan before patching Fitz's arm up. She then carefully placed the cannula with blood in a holder. Fitz rolled back to his computer and got caught up in whatever he was doing instantly. Jemma performed the same procedure while talking blood from herself. She placed name tags on the new cannulas and then she leaned back in her chair, staring at them.

"Do you think we should tell them?" she asked Fitz.

"Tell what?" a voice asked.

Both her and Fitz were startled and she flew up from where she was sitting. It was Skye who'd talked. She was walking into the lab along with the rest of the team. Jemma blushed nervously. She'd almost revealed them, uncertain if that was what Fitz wanted or not.

"Oh, nothing special" he hurried to say. "We were just talking about the…" he began but then he interrupted himself. "You're too many. Who are you?"

Jemma looked up again at his words and saw that he was right. Instead of 4, there were 5 of them standing inside their lab. A man; he was tall and had dark brown hair and very green eyes. He looked as if he was in his late 20s, early 30s. He looked at both of them interesting, not seeming offended by the somewhat rude way Fitz had spoken to him.

"What Fitz is trying to say is 'hello, I'm Leopold Fitz and I'm a rocket scientist, pleasure to meet you'" Skye said with a smile, making Fitz blush.

"It's alright" the man said before turning to Fitz. "I'm dr Vincent Mason. I'm here on personal orders from director Fury."

"Oh? Really? No offence, but why do we need a doctor?" Jemma asked, turning to Coulson.

"I'm not really sure but director Fury has been kind of angry with me ever since we destroyed the plane when we were in Peru. I guess he prefers to have us all together than falling out through a hole in the plane" Coulson said.

"So you're the best?" Jemma asked, now turning to dr Mason.

"Yeah, apparently I am" dr Mason said.

"He's the best" Coulson said. "Besides being a part of the team that was first with mapping brains, he's specialized in every surgical specialty that excists; neuro, cardiothoracic, orthopedic, pediatric, trauma, plastics and general."

Coulson were counting on his fingers for every specialty he mentioned. Then he looked up at dr Mason.

"It feels like I forgot something?" he said.

"Yeah, you forgot the neonatal part" dr Mason said.

"Ah" Coulson said with a smile. "So if anyone wants to have a baby, just talk to Mason."

"Uh, that's not actually how it works, that's not technically what I do" dr Mason said but Coulson was going out of the lab and didn't hear what he had to say.

"Wow, eight different specialties?" Skye asked. "And you're so young. You must've studied more than Simmons to achieve that. Did you have a social life at all?"

"No, I did not" dr Mason said with a laugh. He and Skye was heading out after May and Ward who'd left just after Coulson. "And I still don't have, technically."

"Why would we need a neonatal surgeon onboard?" Fitz asked a bit distracted while reading from a tablet. "Is anyone pregnant?"

Then he looked up at Jemma with big eyes.

"Are you pregnant?" he asked instantly.

"What? No!" she replied quickly. "I haven't even told anyone we're…that's what I was going to ask you about before they marched in here; whether or not we should tell? What do you think?"

"You must be very special" Skye said. "Director Fury had the whole plane renovated just to give you a workspace that's big enough."

She looked over her shoulder to look at dr Mason. He was handsome. Not in the Grant Ward-way but still; he was handsome. He had curly, brown hair and big, green eyes. He was tall, about the same height as Ward and almost as fit. Dr Mason laughed.

"Yeah, I guess I'm special then" he said.

They got into a space just beside the lab. Their own, very new medical room. The lab had been remodeled so that their E.R would fit in. It had to be on the deck, so injuries could be tended to as quickly as possible. The space was split into two rooms. The smaller one was an exam room and it had all the equipment needed for a regular health check or a trauma case. Skye followed dr Mason as he went into the other room, the space intended for surgery. It was bigger, with a table in the middle. Huge lamps were stationed over it and there were trays around the room, lined with loads of duplicates of instruments that Skye had never seen before.

"Wow" dr Mason said slowly while walking around, digesting it all.

"Yeah, wow. Fury probably has a crush on you" Skye said.

She _did_ find the whole medical department of their plane kind of awesome but apparently not as much as dr Mason did. His green eyes were even bigger than they'd been before and he looked like a kid let loose in candy land.

"I'm just going to go talk to Ward. I think there's a briefing in like an hour or something" Skye said, looking at Mason.

"Oh okay" Mason said without turning around to look at her.

She found Ward, along with May and Coulson, in the briefing room. They all looked up in sync when she entered the room.

"Why do we need a doctor?" Skye asked. "Does it have anything to do with my…recklessness?"

Ward looked up at her and she could see a glimpse of pain in his eyes. She had learned to recognize it in his eyes whenever she spoke of her shooting. She knew he blamed himself, with the argument that he was her S.O and he should've kept her out of Quinn's reach. She didn't blame him though.

"No, Skye" he said. "It's not like that. It's…" he interrupted himself and looked at Coulson. "Why do we need a doctor?" he asked.

"It's only because of Fury" Coulson said with a sigh. "We're apparently reckless, all of us, so he felt the need to provide us something that weren't very reckless and that could patch us up in the process."

"Yeah, he must think us _very_ reckless if he spends so much money on building a special medical department for the Bus" Fitz said as he entered the briefing room.

Simmons wasn't with him so Coulson spoke in the speakers that he always used when informing about briefing.

"Briefing in two" he said.

Just a minute later, both Simmons and Mason appeared in the room. Coulson nodded and stepped aside so everyone could see the screen.

"We have an O-8-4 waiting for us in Denmark" he said.

Skye caught his eyes. "In Denmark? What is it?"

"Please tell me it's nothing like the gamma radiating-tesseract object we found in Peru?" Fitz said, sounding concerned.

None of them would forget their first trip together, when everything had gone wrong and it had ended up with a whole in the plane, a mad Fury and Fitz and Ward screaming themselves hoarse at each other because Fitz claimed Ward was an idiot for touching the O-8-4 with his bare hands.

"Oh, I don't know if there's any tesseract energy involved but I suspect that it's something Asgardian" Coulson said.

"Oh, here we go again" Fitz said under his breath.


	2. Chapter 2

May had set the plane on full speed to Denmark and they were there within a few hours. The object was reported to be somewhere in the Danish woods near Kolding. Coulson had told them that the best thing to do was to not draw too much attention to themselves. He'd decided that Ward was going to go along with FitzSimmons. The rest of them were going to stay at the plane.

"Ah" Jemma said cheerily when they were walking back to the plane. "This is really exciting, isn't it?"

She took a deep breath and breathed in the air. It smelled of wood and fir needle. It was fresh and a nice change to the cold air in the lab.

"No, I don't think so. At least not if Ward decides to wear this thing around his neck" Fitz said, sounding grumpy.

"As I said" Ward said with a sigh. "We didn't have a choice last time and besides, nothing happened."

"Yeah, but…" Fitz began but Ward put up his hand to silent him. "What is it?" Fitz asked nervously.

"I heard you" Ward said with a loud voice, peeking in between the trees to their left side. "I heard you, so there's no point in hiding."

Two men slowly appeared from behind the trees. They were big and bulky and wearing dark suits, not your ideal camper. They sent shivers down Jemma's spine. She could feel where this was going and she didn't like it. Mostly because there was nothing she could do in situations like these.

"Nothing will happen if you leave willingly" one of the men said. "No one will get hurt if you just leave the necklace to us."

"No, we don't want to leave it so I suggest you follow your own advice" Ward said to the men.

That was apparently the wrong thing to say because one of them took a gun from his belt and pointed it towards Ward. Ward took a step towards him. He ducked just as the man threw a punch at him. He manage to knock the gun out of the man's hand and it flew to where Jemma and Fitz stood, a few meters away, looking terrified.

"Run" Ward shouted at them when the other man launched himself and him and the ended up in a pile at the ground.

But Jemma and Fitz just stood there, unable to move. They saw how the two men overpowered Ward. Ward managed to kick one of them in the face so bad that he passed out while the other one was holding him. The other man took a firm grip around Ward's neck, trying to choke him. Ward turned red in his face and then slowly, a nasty shade of purple. Ward managed to kick himself free and gasped for air. But the man got up from the ground and got a hold of Wards arm. He had a firm grip and there was a loud, cracking noise and there was Ward screaming in pain as they'd never heard him scream before. Ward tried to get up but he was in so much pain that it took all his strength to get up on his knees. When the man turned to her and Fitz, she already had the gun in her hand, not sure of how it had ended up there. He had blood on his clothes, Ward's blood she realized. He took a few steps towards here before there was two loud bangs, as if from a fired gun. The man collapsed in front of them.

"Oh dear lord" Fitz mumbled in her ear before running towards Ward.

She'd shot him. She'd shot that man. Twice. When did I pick up the gun? She asked herself. But then she heard Fitz shout her name and she looked at his way. He was hosting Ward up from the ground. The left side of him was demolished and he screamed when Fitz pulled him up. His collarbone was off and sticking out. The sight made Jemma sick to her stomach but she took Fitz's bags and they slowly walked to the plane.

"Simmons, can you tell dr Mason that he has work to do?" Fitz said, a bit out of breath under Ward's weight.

Ward was gasping for air and was trying to breathe through the pain. Blood was still gushing out through the wound and was soaking both Ward's and Fitz's shirts. Jemma turned on the piece in her ear that would allow her to contact the plane.

"It's Simmons here, do you copy? There's been an…incident. Agent Ward requires serious medical help" she said.

"Agent Coulson here, what kind of injuries are we talking about? When should dr Mason expect you?" Coulson replied.

"Um, we're about five minutes from the plane" Jemma answered. "And uh, the collarbone is sticking out."

She heard Coulson gasp for air before replying with a "Copy that." She could hear him giving orders in the background with the line still open.

Dr Mason was standing at the platform ready with a gurney. Skye and Coulson were with him and Skye whimpered when she saw the bone sticking out of Ward. Even Coulson had to look away. Fitz helped Ward onto the gurney and dr Mason rolled him over to the trauma/exam room.

"Skye" Coulson said. "You should be in there with agent Ward."

Skye nodded and followed them. When she got into the room, dr Mason was busy checking Ward's pupil response.

"So, if I say that the pain is a 9, am I right then?" he asked.

"Yes" Ward managed to say.

"Hmm…" dr Mason said while moving on to check out the bone that was sticking out.

"Oh my God, that's disgusting" Skye said when she got a clearer view.

"There's only one thing to do" dr Mason said. "And that's to push back in again. It'll hurt a great deal while healing but there's nothing to do about it."

Skye got a lump in her throat, she couldn't imagine going around with that pain. She was that kind of person that cried while hitting her toe on the threshold while Ward was the kind of guy who could take ten punches to the face and still walk away somewhat okay. If this pain was so bad that Ward was almost crying…she didn't even want to begin to imagine how much it hurt.

"I'll prepare the anesthesia" dr Mason said and he went into the O.R.

Ward was getting paler by the second and Skye wondered why dr Mason hadn't given him anything for the pain. Ward slowly put his right hand on her arm.

"No anesthesia" he said.

"What? Are you sure?" Skye said.

"No anesthesia" he repeated just as Mason entered the room again.

She looked up at Mason to see if he'd heard. He hadn't apparently; he was busy putting on the navy blue scrub cap that matched the scrubs he'd changed into. Skye realized that Ward was going to need surgery.

"He says he doesn't want anesthesia" Skye said, looking at Mason.

Mason frowned.

"Well, he needs surgery. If I'm going to fix the exit wound where the bone is piercing out I'll have to sedate him" he said.

"No, no anesthesia. No surgery" Ward said.

"Okay, I'll push the bone in now and I'll come up with a different solution later. How does that sound?" Mason said.

"Yes" Ward gasped.

"Do you want morphine for the pain?" Mason asked.

Ward shook his head. Mason nodded and took another quick look at the bone. Skye hoped that he knew what he was doing but on the other hand, this was his specialty she told herself, of course he knows what he's doing.

"You might want to hold his hand" Mason said sincerely.

When Skye stretched out her hand, Ward took a firm grip around it. Mason turned around and grabbed a pair of gloves. He looked ridiculously hot in his scrubs and the cap and Skye felt embarrassed for thinking about it now, while Ward was lying there on the gurney. But he was_ really_ hot.

"Okay agent Ward, this is going to hurt very much, you know that, right?" Mason said. "I'm asking you one last time, are you sure you don't want anesthesia?"

"No" Ward said as firmly as he could.

"Okay, I'm going to push the bone back in. And I'm going to do it on three, okay?" Mason said.

He placed his right hand right on the bone, which made Ward scream out in pain. Mason started counting but pushed the bone in on one. Ward screamed so loud that Skye's ears were ringing. When it'd stopped, she realized that Ward had passed out.

"Skye, get agent Simmons here urgently" Mason said. "I need her as a scrub nurse and that's quick."

"Skye said it was urgently" Jemma said.

"Yes" Mason answered. "Ward refused anesthesia so I had to push in his bone while he was awake which made him pass out because of the pain and now I have to sedate him properly before he wakes up so I can fix the exit wound."

"Oh" Jemma answered. "But what do you need me for?"

"You're specialized in life science, right? You're going to be my scrub nurse" Mason said. "There are scrubs and a cap for you in the storage room to the left of Coulson's office. Hurry, he's lost a lot of blood."


	3. Chapter 3

A few hours later, Jemma was walking up the stairs. Her steps were heavy and she was tired. Her back and legs were hurting from standing in the same position for hours. The surgery on Ward's collarbone had taken a while but dr Mason had done a very good job. Ward was going to be in pain, of course, but it was going to heal. When she entered the common lounge, she saw the rest of the team gathered around the bar. They all turned around when they heard her steps and their faces were full of questions.

"Dr Mason did a very good job" Jemma hurried to say.

She could see the relief flushing over Coulson's face. Skye sighed heavily and Jemma realized that seeing Ward like that couldn't have been easy on her. Jemma turned to Fitz who had buried his head in the tablet on the table. She could see that he was looking at weapons, a newer version of the night-night gun.

"So, any news on the 084?" Jemma asked.

"No, we haven't actually done anything yet" Fitz said and looked up at her. "I didn't want to start without you."

"Oh, we'll get on it the first thing in the morning then" Jemma said. "I'm going to go and change."

She left them, Coulson sipping thoughtfully on his drink while talking to Skye and Fitz being all caught up by the tablet. Jemma threw the scrubs on the floor; she hoped she wouldn't have to wear them anytime soon. She slipped into her night gown and fell asleep the second her head hit the pillow.

She woke up by the sound of knocking. She sat up, slightly disoriented, before she remembered where she was. It always took a while before it came back to her but when it did, she remembered everything. Every little detail. She opened the door to her bunk and squinted instinctively, as her eyes weren't adjusted to the light they met. She realized she was staring into Fitz's chest. She looked up to meet his eyes.

"Jemma!" he said loudly. "How can you still be asleep? We have an 084 to deal with and it's already noon!"

At the noon-part, Jemma's eyes widened. Noon? Was he playing with her? She never slept until noon, never had before in her life. She was an early bird, usually stationed in the lab at 8 o'clock or earlier if it was possible (although, the labs had always been locked until 8.30 at the Academy and she'd really found it annoying more than once).

"Yeah, yeah" she mumbled. "Give me a second and I'll come down."

She showered as quickly as she could and put on her clothes so fast it took a while before she realized that she'd forgot to put on a bra. She was halfway down to the lab before she noticed it and she ran back up the stairs, hoping she wouldn't meet Coulson or May. She was not in the mood of being lecture for behaving like a hopeless teenager. When she finally got down to the lab, Fitz waited for her. He was sitting on her chair, spinning around as she'd done the day before. He stopped when he saw her and glanced at his watch.

"Fourteen minutes and thirty-seven seconds. Impressive" he said.

"Thank you" Jemma answered. "Now, where's the necklace?"

Fitz jumped of her chair and lifted a box from his workspace over onto the holotable. He gave Jemma a pair of black rubber gloves and then took a pair for himself. Suddenly, Skye strolled in. She sat down on Jemma's chair and rolled closer to the holotable.

"Nice to see you out and about" she said, looking at Jemma. "I thought you'd died in your sleep or something."

"I was tired, after the surgery" Jemma said, a bit defensively.

"Well, Mason didn't seem very tired and as far as I know, he was the one doing the actual work" Skye continued.

"Well, surgeons are ruthless. They are used to working triple shifts and standing in the same position for 18 hours straight, it's not my fault that Mason is exactly that kind of stereotypic surgeon" Jemma said.

"And which are the signs of one being a stereotypic surgeon?" Mason asked.

He was walking in through the door with a mysterious smile on his lips and Jemma got the feeling that he'd heard a lot more of the conversation than he was showing.

"You have to have a strong back and the ability to work with sleep deprivation" Skye said.

Jemma blushed. She wasn't really sure if she'd wanted Mason to hear all that, especially not since he'd raised her work to the sky last night during surgery.

"I'm not saying you're not good at what you do, I'm just saying that I'm not a scrub nurse" Jemma said.

She concentrated on what Fitz was doing, which was picking the foreign necklace out of the box. She saw Skye's eyes widen when she saw it.

"Don't touch it" Fitz snapped towards her.

"I wasn't going to" Skye said.

"Oh, I saw it, it was in your eyes" Fitz said. "It was, right?" He looked at Mason for support.

"Yeah, it was" Mason nodded.

Skye mumbled something that sounded a lot like an insult and folded her arms across her chest.

"Oh yeah, right" Mason said. "I came down here to tell you that Ward was asking for you."

"He was?" Skye said, sounding astonished but happy.

"Yeah, but I don't think you should approach him with that look on your face" Mason said. "When I went to check on him this morning he was already up and it took him two seconds before he started screaming at me for giving him pain meds."

"Yeah" Skye said, a bit awkwardly. "He's a little special something."

Skye got up from Jemma's chair and Mason went with her. Fitz followed them and closed the door to the lab. He took another quick glance at his watch.

"They wasted another nine minutes and forty-seven seconds" he complained. "Can we please get to work?"

Jemma nodded and they started to examine the necklace. It was made out of pure gold and it had rubies and sapphires attached to it. It was gleaming as the light was reflected in the ruby in the middle. They agreed on running it with the Asgardian database to see if they got a match.

"Ah, look" Fitz said and pointed at the holotable.

The synchronization with the database was finished. A drawing that matched the necklace in front of them appeared on the screen.

"It's called Brisingamen" Fitz said as he read from the information. "And it says here that it belonged to Freya."

"And she was the goddess of what again?" Jemma asked.

"Fertility" Fitz said.

"We should tell Coulson about this. I mean, it's Asgardian, that' cannot be good" Jemma said. "Can you go get him, please?"

Fitz nodded and as he walked towards the locked lab doors, they slipped aside. She watched him walk up the twisted stairs and the two men were back in a minute.

"Fitz tells me that you've identified the necklace as the Brisingamen" Coulson said.

"That's right, sir" Jemma confirmed. "Although it's Asgardian I don't think it poses a threat to us as long as we do not touch it. Freya was after all only the goddess of fertility."

"Oh, that can be a _very_ scary thing" Coulson mumbled, more to himself than to her and Fitz. "I'll tell May to set the course for the Sandbox. There are people who have specialized in Asgardian objects, we should let them have a look at it."


End file.
